Litigation In The Age Of Big Data: How Everlaw Is Tackling The Most Complex Technical Issues In eDiscovery

As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, lawyers and eDiscovery professionals are seeing their workloads and challenges expand.

As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, lawyers and eDiscovery professionals are seeing their workloads and challenges expand. We sat down with AJ Shankar, the CEO of Everlaw, Inc., the creators of a cloud-based eDiscovery platform designed to handle large volumes of complex data, to discuss the current state of eDiscovery and how Everlaw is helping lawyers tackle the difficult technical issues and improve collaboration to achieve better outcomes.

Can you give us a little background on Everlaw and why you created it?

Everlaw is a collaborative litigation platform in which we handle discovery from ingestion of data and processing, all the way through the standard discovery steps, and then into case preparation, or story-building as we call it. One of the big challenges of litigation is figuring out how to handle all the evidence — how do you take a giant haystack, find the appropriate needles, and then use them to knit together a really good story?

That process is really technical. It’s a big data problem. Lawyers typically don’t have enough time or resources to find what’s important, so they turn to artificial intelligence for help. Everlaw looked at these workflows and experiences and set out to build a technology company that addresses all those technology challenges really robustly, so the practitioners can do what they really want to do, which is practice law. We’re not a legal company that happens to build software, but a technology company that happens to be in law. Our focus is on how we can use technology to benefit our users the most.

There are plenty of eDiscovery platforms on the market today. What sets Everlaw apart?

The volume of data that’s discoverable is growing at an enormous rate. What used to just be documents in file cabinets and Word documents on servers is now every email you ever sent, every Slack chat you’ve written, not to mention audio and video. Everlaw is designed architecturally to be scaled to enormous data sizes, which is a huge benefit for people dealing with complex issues. Cases that may not be big today might be huge tomorrow, and you need to be able to accommodate those changes.

We also believe that collaboration is integral to the process of discovery and litigation, whether it’s just within your team, managing a review team, or working with in-house or outside counsel, so we’ve woven that into the fabric of Everlaw. The ability to work with people, communicate, and collaborate within the confines of the platform is really important, and we’re an industry leader in that regard.

Discoverable data is expanding into a wide variety of formats that people don’t always know how to handle, which we call dark data. Everlaw is at the forefront of handling dark data in eDiscovery. You don’t get to pick the data that’s discoverable, you just have to deal with what you have. We’re pushing the envelope in terms of the kind of data we can handle robustly.

How is AI impacting the practice of law today?

Today, nobody is particularly close to what you might call generalized artificial intelligence, which is the notion of human-level computer intelligence, despite attempts at major innovation. AI is well-suited for targeted applications, in particular for applications where there isn’t a lot of ambiguity and or context to work with. Law, and discovery in particular, doesn’t meet those criteria particularly well. It deals with English text, which is very ambiguous and full of context. Often ambiguity is essential to making a case. So AI will struggle to be a complete human replacement.

Humans are very good at ambiguity and context. There’s still a huge opportunity for AI to try to augment human intelligence, augment human review, help prioritize where to look, or help identify interesting observations and trends. AI is excellent at discovering trends and connections within data. It can review huge amounts of data consistently and quickly, in a way a human could never do.  For the foreseeable future AI is going to be reliant on human input and human guidance. Within that realm, we’re working on making AI be a better advisor and an even better augmenter of human intelligence. We view AI as a partnership with humans. We try to make it so humans know how well the AI is doing and trust it.

What do you think the big issues will be in the near future for eDiscovery?

Dark data, or the increasing variety of data types, is something that needs to be solved and cannot be solved by AI. Signing up for new software is now much easier to do than it used to be, which means that the variety of file types you need to support is much bigger, and there’s no indication that that trend will change. Lawyers need to stay ahead of the curve in terms of knowing what’s discoverable and getting the most out of it.

I do think AI is absolutely necessary to combat the increasing volume of discoverable data. Lawyers are going to need to be integrating it more and more tightly, not just into standard responsiveness review, but into every component of preparing and understanding a case.

I also think collaboration is going to be a huge frontier. Collaborative tools in the industry are currently not particularly well developed compared to other industries. As cases continue to get larger and more entities have to interact with each other on a case, really robust collaborative tools to manage the process of discovery are going to be critical to getting the most out of what you’ve found. I think we’re going to see a trend in eDiscovery toward making collaboration easier.

Finally I think security and privacy will remain of paramount importance. Legal cases often involve sensitive information which must be reviewed by various third parties. Organizations and their customers must be confident that there are robust security and privacy measures in place to ensure appropriate access of data. This is not just about whether the data is encrypted, but the entire security posture from physical security to employee training to technical safeguards like intrusion detection and penetration testing.

What’s in store for Everlaw in 2019?

We’re innovating at a substantial rate. We’re expecting the investment in the platform and user experience to increase on all fronts. I think we’re most excited about taking care of the thorny, technical processes and details in an elegant way, so that lawyers can focus on practicing law. Everlaw gives lawyers the opportunity to view their discovery software not as a necessary evil, but instead as a great piece of technology that they’re happy to use because it makes their job easier and improves their odds of winning the case.

We’re also expanding with a new office in the UK the week after Legaltech, which we’re very excited about.

Speaking of Legaltech, Everlaw is scheduled to give a talk. Can you tell us a little more about that?

We’re giving a talk on dark data: the data that you find during discovery that you can’t really use, because it’s in an inaccessible or unsearchable format. Up to 10 percent of case data is “dark” in this way, and your inability to review it is no consolation to your client, whose case may depend on what’s in it. There are always new challenges in this area, and awareness and education are really important. We’re experts at file formats that aren’t handled well, like audio recordings or foreign language documents, using technology to make them easy to review. Lawyers certainly don’t need to know how to code, but they do need to understand what they’re dealing with, and what questions to ask when it comes to data formats and discovery. Knowing that you can solve these problems is really valuable. You don’t need the answers, but you do need to know the right questions to ask at the right time so you have access to your data.

You can catch Everlaw at Legalweek in the Emerging Technologies session “Illuminating Dark Data: Risk Mitigation in the Era of Big Data,” moderating the panel “Rethinking your eDiscovery Approach for In-House Counsel,” and in the exhibit hall in booth #202.